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What convolutional neural networks look at when they see nudity
- rcpt 11y agoauthor here: let me know if you have any questions
- x1798DE 11y agoIs the idea that people would submit all images to your pre trained API / program, or would they also be generating a training set themselves? How sensitive is the algorithm to incorrectly tagged images in the training set?
- rcpt 11y agoRight now we've got the fully-trained convnet deployed here: https://developer.clarifai.com/guide/tag#nsfw https://developer.clarifai.com/guide/tag#nsfw I have not quantified how robust this net is in the face of noisy labels.
- sbierwagen 11y agoHow well does it work on grayscale images? EDIT: Just created an account and tried it out on a test image, and it returned "nsfw" with prob 0.998, which is pretty amazing. EDIT2: It's much less strong against oblique views, even with full color. http://40.media.tumblr.com/cfeea64370e3b1228906472ebd8f344e/tumblr_mzpr3pIBWJ1t2mv1oo1_500.jpg http://40.media.tumblr.com/cfeea64370e3b1228906472ebd8f344e/... (NSFW, obviously!) only returns 0.541.
- rcpt 11y agoAwesome, fwiw you can hit the demo here without getting an API key http://clarifai.com/?model=nsfw-v1.0&probs=1 http://clarifai.com/?model=nsfw-v1.0&probs=1
- namelezz 11y agoHow did you come up with 64x64 sliding windows?
- rcpt 11y agoJust tried a few heat maps and that one looked good.
- web007 11y agoHow well does your solution handle non-white-people NSFW images? I know it's only a matter of training with other inputs, but most solutions I've seen haven't been trained with enough non-Caucasian images to give good results. Since this at least seems to be detecting shape regardless of skin tone it has more potential, but it'll only be as good as its training set.
- rcpt 11y agoIt was trained on non-white-people NSFW images to (eg. non-white people, hentai). However, I don't have per genre numbers right now.
- web007 11y agoI'm sure it's easy to find "training data" for this project, but FYI 4walled dot cc is probably a GREAT source. It's an archive of thousands of 4chan images, and most are already classified by SFW / Borderline / NSFW. Since it came from 4chan, it includes lots of non-pornographic NSFW things as well (gore, swastikas, etc.), and lots of duplicates with various cropping, reencodimg and other processing done to them.
- empath75 11y agoCould you do a deep dream run and generate porn images from the training set?
- emmab 11y agoWhy did you have no male examples?
- rcpt 11y agoLook closer at the last figure.
- Phemist 11y agoInteresting! I wonder how it performs on this vase, which is obviously inscribed with dolphins: http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff4/3dd13_04/dolphin-vase.jpg http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff4/3dd13_04/dolphin-vase...
- maaaats 11y agoHuh. Even after having used that classic Lena image in the header for multiple visualization projects, I never knew she was naked in the full version.
- 0xCMP 11y agoAfter reading many of these articles I never thought that either. No body ever seemed to mention it.
- j2kun 11y agoUnfortunately, whenever someone mentions that Lena was a nude model (perhaps to suggest objecting to the image's use in academic settings as an appropriate testbed), everyone gets angry. Negative reinforcement, I suppose.
- namelezz 11y agoThat negative reinforcement yields good results though.
- Trombone12 11y agoTo clarify: the only meaning "good results" could refer to is the continued use of a cropped piece of pornography as a standard test image for image research for over twenty years.
- dharma1 11y agoThis is great. Hadn't heard of deconvnets. Thanks for posting!
- scotty79 11y agoDeep dream on this might be visually interesting.
- rcpt 11y agohttp://deepdickdreams.tumblr.com/ http://deepdickdreams.tumblr.com/ What a time to be alive
- DiabloD3 11y agoThe only one that's really recognizable without any real cues (such as Hulk Hogan's bright yellow clothing) is Ted Cruz. I find this hilarious for reasons that are off topic on HN and politically inflammatory.
- qb45 11y agoThose pictures look lame because the algo is trying much too hard. Is there some way to locate areas most suitable for "enhancement" and process only those?
- burfog 11y agoThose aren't the best politicians to choose. You need to do Michael Dukakis, the Democrat who ran in 1988. He has a big long nose and bushy eyebrows already.
- rdl 11y agoThis is exactly the kind of content I love to see -- interesting technical topic, completely outside of any area of expertise of mine, clearly presented, interesting, and pretty obviously useful. Please post more!
- rcpt 11y agoHey thanks!
- nailer 11y agoDid clarifai have a different company name a few years ago? I built a realtime threaded discussion app with images a few years years ago (like secret or yikyak but in 2011) and used a REST API that was capable of recognising actual body parts. It generally worked well, with the exception of false negatives for cartoon nudity and false positives for pastrami.
- nailer 11y agoHrm it looks like I was using recogmission / pifilter, which now seems defunct: https://recogmission.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/adult-image-detection-service-pifilter-is-ready/ https://recogmission.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/adult-image-de...
- cheez 11y agoMachine learning, at a high level, is incredibly accessible. The basic technology has been around for a long time and has been taught over and over again.
- rkaplan 11y agoHighly recommend this video on the Deep Visualization Toolbox to anyone interesting in understanding more about how convnets work through visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkfIQ4IGaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkfIQ4IGaM
- pareci 11y agoCould you make it faster if you had no ego?
- monkpit 11y agoWhat does that even mean?
- iso-8859-1 11y agoMaybe pareci is considering whether the paper's author is a convnet.
- dang 11y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11530336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11530336 and marked it off-topic.
- yzh 11y agoIt could be used as an NSFW content identifier, it also could be used as a fine-grained porn video classifier. At least that's what I want to use it for.
- jug 11y agoYes, they have a pointer for work like that, too. > If you're interested in using convnets to filter NSFW images, check our NSFW API documentation to get started. https://developer.clarifai.com/guide/tag#nsfw https://developer.clarifai.com/guide/tag#nsfw
- rocky1138 11y agoCan you drop the scrolljacking on your site? I spun my mousewheel and I went halfway down the page. Usually I instantly jump ship in these cases (even when the header is a Playboy centrefold. Priorities, priorities...)
- jdiez17 11y ago+1. It was difficult to scroll on my laptop, even the smallest scroll gesture I can make moved the page down more than I wanted. I don't know why some websites hijack scroll events. What are they trying to achieve? A better scrolling experience? Almost every time, it makes it a lot more frustrating.
- rcpt 11y agoHey what browser are you using? None of us here know what's going on with this.
- Freaky 11y agoNot sure what's going on with the weird scroll speeds, but for me the problem is motion sickness from the smooth bouncy scrolling. Browsers have options to disable smooth scrolling for a reason. Please don't force it back on.
- rcpt 11y agoUgh. I still don't know what thing in WordPress set this off. fwiw I have the same content on my personal blog which shouldn't do anything with your scrolling http://ryancompton.net/2016/04/19/what-convolutional-neural-networks-look-at-when-they-look-at-nudity/ http://ryancompton.net/2016/04/19/what-convolutional-neural-...
- viraptor 11y agoWherever it comes from, I'm guessing the "smooth-scroller" class on <body> applies it.
- xts_chain 11y agoYou forgot to mention the boobs. Everyone likes those, even if it's just pixely thumbnails.
- dang 11y agoPlease don't do this here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11530734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11530734 and marked it off-topic.
- fnaticshank 11y agoRecently watched the Machine Learning Conference and learnt about Clarifai there ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHE0DfBqwHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHE0DfBqwHo ) And its pretty cool to see that they are actually expanding along various verticals and understand every image and even videos. And its great to see it here today. Please keep posting more crisp, concise and technical posts here! Kudos for forevery!
- make3 11y agothis could be used as a YouTube thumbnail generator for clickbait videos. take the image from the sfw video that has the highest nsfw score, crop down to the area with the highest nsfw score, and bam, instant automatically generated clickbait
- teraflop 11y agoGoogle actually already does something along these lines: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/10/improving-youtube-video-thumbnails-with.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/10/improving-youtube...
- zerotimer 11y agoWhy doesn't youtube show future frames when you scroll over a video's thumbnail? This feature has existed on many porn sites for quite some time yet youtube lacks it for some reason. Or is there a way to change this in settings?
- jzwinck 11y agoPerhaps they expect one good keyframe to draw your attention, then the title to help you decide whether to watch. I suspect most YouTube watchers are not in it for the aesthetics, but rather for the content, so a title like "Jelly Bean Factory Tour" can be quite sufficient vs. something like "Amazing amateur video." Your interest in jelly bean factories is probably not predicated on whether the presenter is hot, or whether the beans are a certain color.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago> Your interest in jelly bean factories is probably not predicated on whether the presenter is hot TV networks seem to disagree with you... or at least place an immense amount of emphasis on finding hot presenters, for some reason.
- 11y ago
- lucidrains 11y agook, somebody go train a generative network now
- andrewfromx 11y agocan you imagine the ai bots that get to work on this assignment? once computers become more like the AI in the movie ex machina, would a bot be "turned on" by the nudity? it would affect them. The bot would be distracted by it and have a hard time concentrating on other things when it's around. Sounds human to me.
- crpatino 11y agoWhy would it be "distracted" by it? There certainly can be a bot that pays more attention to any feature the programmer instructs it to, but to what purpose? What is the bot supposed to do with this particular stream of bits that was just promoted to its attention? If the answer is, "stop other productive work and waste CPU cycles" that says a lot more about what "turns on" the programmer than about the program itself.
- cooper12 11y agoWhy would "computers become more like the AI in the movie ex machina"? What are you basing that on? Are you knowledgable about how the field of AI is progressing or how these bots function? Do be careful to not confuse fiction with reality.
- andrewfromx 11y agoI'm just saying, it's funny to think once computer have "feelings" and approach human level, the ones trained to do this, are the lucky ones. And, if the world is a simulation, maybe a very similair algo was once programmed in us.
- chriswarbo 11y agoSurely if you were making a "human level" AI with "feelings", you'd make it attracted to cleaning; or building cars; or whatever task it was built for? http://hitchhikersguidetoearth.wikia.com/wiki/Sirius_Cybernetics_Corporation#Doors http://hitchhikersguidetoearth.wikia.com/wiki/Sirius_Cyberne...
- zyx321 11y agoThere's no reason an AI would attach any particular significance to human nudity unless it was specifically designed for a sex bot. Things that turn on and distract an AI would be things found in their positive training data. Nudity wouldn't work, but if you train an AI for long enough, it might develop some interesting 'fetishes'.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThis is very exciting as I toyed with this problem around 2000-2001. I speculated it should be easy to recognize porn because the images had recurring patterns. I made a list of a bunch of them that should at least reduce a moderator's workload. Not going into details but the best foresight I had was recognizing the Got Milk commercials would throw the classifications off. It did lol. In any case, we just had things like fuzzy logic, SVM's, primitive ANN's, and so on. I could describe and illustrate the patterns with ease but couldn't encode them into an algorithm for the life of me. That the modern tech created in the image set some of the same exact patterns my brain spotted is pretty amazing. The researchers also have a ton of training data to better illustrate NSFW and SFW. That they're throwing in lots of SFW is very smart as it's easier to bias this topic than most. All I can say I keep up the good work. Been neat to see an insurmountable-on-Pentium2 problem get stomped by the CNN's. I still want to see them applied more to hunting source code defects, host forensics, and intrusions.
- jordigh 11y agoHave you ever considered quitting porn? Have you ever wondered if the women that you're classifying have any reservations about being exposed for your titillation?
- jordigh 11y agoHeh, the internet does not like having its purpose questioned. Porn must flow...
- SixSigma 11y agoI am Pornstar Gianna Michaels, AMA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/duplicates/3vaqet/i_am_pornstar_gianna_michaels_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/duplicates/3vaqet/i_am_pornsta...
- jordigh 11y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=exploited+by+porn&t=keywordsearch https://duckduckgo.com/?q=exploited+by+porn&t=keywordsearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Lubben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Lubben
- SixSigma 11y ago> During her pornographic career, which lasted from 1993–1994
- jordigh 11y agoShe managed to get out early. Others don't: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2501887/Jenna-Jameson-returns-porn-despite-vowing-involved-adult-films-again.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2501887/Jenna-J...
- SixSigma 11y agoThese are pre-internet porn careers, the world has changed
- rcpt 11y agoin case the blog goes down there is a backup here http://ryancompton.net/2016/04/19/what-convolutional-neural-networks-look-at-when-they-look-at-nudity/ http://ryancompton.net/2016/04/19/what-convolutional-neural-...
- irascible 11y agoIf they had taught me this in high school I'd have never dropped out.
- narrator 11y agoCombining one of these nudity trained classifiers with a project like neural-style (https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style) could create some serious mischief.
- iaw 11y agoI will give $20 USD to the first person to set this up and run Donald Trump through it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Houshalter 11y agohttp://i.imgur.com/tedzYSO.jpg?1 http://i.imgur.com/tedzYSO.jpg?1
- sceadu 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhI88tg1Gqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhI88tg1Gqg
- elwell 11y agoNSFL?
- AceJohnny2 11y agoThat hashname is disturbingly close to top Linux contributor and ext2/3/4fs maintainer's name Ted Y. Ts'o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ts%27o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ts%27o
- iaw 11y agoHow shall I arrange payment? Please post the source as well, surprisingly I don't see much of a difference.
- 11y ago
- shanacarp 11y agoTrue story: Then we throw before and afters of Prophylactic Bilateral Mastectomies with various types of nipple reconstructions among previvors who found each other and were part of a semi-private group on facebook, and hell breaks loose. A classifier isn't human judgement by itself, and you need to be aware of how people view something in context. Good training images are also critical (one of the reasons why hell broke loose above were some people mastectomies were more likely to be censored than others) Though I will admit I am very curious what happens if you throw a Robert Mapplethorpe at it. Then everyone got censored, then the group got banned, then facebook got slammed by cancer groups and cut a deal with them to rehost cancer support groups as long as everyone stopped sharing mastectomies directly to facebook because Facebook could not specially moderate and alter feeds for those thinking about or dealing with prophylactic mastectomies. However, this issue still pops up ALL THE TIME for them on Instagram
- harperlee 11y agoTrue story: an argentinian video for breast cancer autoexploration had to be filmed with a fat man because otherwise it would get banned. Warning: In spanish and surely NSFW for someone: http://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/04/19/articulo/1461073073_092430.html http://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/04/19/articulo/1461073073...
- umanwizard 11y agoHeh, this SFW picture of a room (or is it a cardboard box? hard to tell!) is 75% likely to be NSFW, according to the API. http://bit.ly/20VySR5 http://bit.ly/20VySR5
- Svenstaro 11y agoTo be fair, at first glance my brain thought that too.
- goodcanadian 11y agoAnd because your brain (and my brain) parsed it that way, it is likely that others will too which may mean that it is not really a picture you want on your screen at work. I.e. even though it is technically OK, it may be, for practical purposes, NSFW.
- medmunds 11y agoApparently apple pie has been a significant source of false positives in NSFW detection -- it mimics both flesh tones and contours. (Or so I was told by a then-major image hosting company pitching their filtering tech several years back.)
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoNote, if you actually care about whether links you click are SFW or not, that link is NSFW as to your coworkers in the room, it will be indistinguishable from you looking at graphic porn.
- vacri 11y agoMostly only if they're porn consumers themselves. Plenty of folks don't make the suggestive links for images of this kind. Reminds me of an MMORPG guild I used to be a member of, called Fist of Innoruuk. The forum had a large background image of a fist in a (star? wreath? can't recall). One of the members was reading the forum at work when his boss walked by and asked why he was looking at a fisting forum at work: "What's a fisting forum?".
- jjcm 11y agoAs an aside, this might be the first time I've seen Lena used in a completely uncontroversial manner.
- eggy 11y agoSo true. Here the use fits the application. In past, people objected to using a Playboy centerfold as standard image in science, software distros, etc... I remember Lena on my Amiga 1000...
- philip1209 11y agoI wonder how this performs on black-and-white images.
- btilly 11y agoI love the choice of Lena at the top. The image has a surprising history. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna for the basics.
- devilsbabe 11y agoThe about the author section describes him as a "NSFW enthusiast". Aren't we all...
- misiti3780 11y agogreat post - where did the training data of 500K images come from ?
- dharma1 11y agohand picked? hard work ;)
- misiti3780 11y agosomeone handpicked 500K images ... come on now :) no way
- rcpt 11y ago500k were for testing, we trained on several million. Can't say where I get them.
- MzHN 11y agoI've been wondering, since there have been white papers on reconstructing occluded faces based on face detection algorithms[1], and we have these nudity detection algorithms - do you see where I'm going - when will someone make a neural network that can automatically make any photo showing skin into a nude photo... [1] EDIT: I did not find my original link, but here is a similar paper http://www8.cs.umu.se/education/examina/Rapporter/NaeemAshfaqChaudhry-submitted.pdf http://www8.cs.umu.se/education/examina/Rapporter/NaeemAshfa...
- matheweis 11y agoHow fun - their convnets have determined that Facebook is an incarnate deity. https://www.facebook.com/images/fb_icon_325x325.png https://www.facebook.com/images/fb_icon_325x325.png is classified as "cross", "no person", "Resurrection", "spirituality", "symbol", "religion", "god". In all seriousness, I found this pretty interesting, as I've been toying with using RNNs to classify NSFW images on my icon conversion site. The biggest issue that I've run into is that "icons" are squarely in a different class that photographic images. For some reason the *NN networks that I've toyed with break down on classifying icons because they aren't able to easily correlate a stylistic interpretation with a real item. It kind of makes sense given how they work, but there's got to be a way to work around it...
- smartbit 11y agoAccurate recognition of breast & vulva mimics the brains of men. I don't think though that men can create neural nets that simulate the brain of woman ;-)
- stared 11y agoIs it only me, or the top bar (which re-appears with scrolling up) is extra-annoying?